professor of politics at the college, describing Oberlin students’ judgment of President Barack Obama, said it had cooled significantly — sometimes to the point of disillusionment.

…Oberlin students now being described as “disheartened” by the performance of theirPresident Obama, or standing at a distance from Oberlin’s badge of honor of engaged, left-wing politics?

That’s a speck of confetti in a storm of pre-2012 election indicators in America, but it’s also a fact that Mr. Obama’s most diligent canvassers in 2008 often came from the country’s campuses. Without the enthusiasm and activism of millions of students — and their authenticating support for the would-be president’s pitch as the unifying candidate of change — Mr. Obama might not have found a bridge for bringing groups of independents and Reagan Democrats into his camp.

… Michael Parkin, the faculty voice who described the Oberlin trend, placed the change of affection in relationship to the president in an emotional framework.

In a conversation after the symposium, he spoke of a love affair that, to a palpable degree, had wound down. “It started hot and heavy,” he said. “And with extremely idealized notions. Then a reality dawned in the way that a once charming laugh becomes an irritating giggle: He’s a politician who no longer corresponds to the grand ideas that many students had in their heads about him. And that’s deflating and disheartening for them.”

… Potentially pleasing to his campus activist supporters, his initial areas of focus — a world without nuclear weapons, or an apologetic refusal to hold up U.S. democracy as a model for the Arab and Islamic world — have been scaled down as presidential hallmarks.